On 02/20/2016 12:35 PM, John Robinson wrote:
Prevention is impossible, be it from a knife, ax, truckload of fertilizer, etc. etc. but in the event of a known perpetrator then let Apple, Google, whomever, have the devise and do the work privately within their own shop, giving authorities what they need for this case…that seems right, but to put us all out there for the globe to become our bed partners, not my cup of tea.
John,I have trouble with this because the existence of such a tool will be enough to force Apple to use it. Any law enforcement agency anywhere in the world can then call on Apple to use its tool, based on local law. Google and Samsung must also be in their sights.
If Apple can be forced to do this for the iPhone, then it won't be long until this is the precedent to force open laptops encrypted by FileVault or BitLocker or PGPDisk or any of the many other laptop encryption programs.
How long will it be until these back doors leak?Will every security company be forced to compromise its product as it's being written?
Strong encryption is just mathematics. The perfume is out of the bottle. It can be programmed by thousands of people all over the world. If it becomes impossible for U.S. companies to write true security software, then it will be written and sold by non-U.S. companies.
L^2PS/ Back in 1990, it was illegal to export strong encryption programs from the United States. The government classified such programs as munitions. Even then, I thought this was stupid. The algorithms are so simple, I had purchased a T-shirt with a strong encryption algorithm implemented as a 10-line Pascal program on its back. I wore it through a bunch of foreign airports to conferences in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, thereby becoming an international arms merchant. Of course, there were dozens of mathematicians at those conferences who could have written the Pascal program. In fact, this particular T-shirt came from Israel and was sold at many American mathematical conferences.
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